So why do you think libertarianism should be about threats to liberty when such threats do not in any way constrain the liberty of the listener?

You quoted me and responded as if you were disagreeing with what I said. But your comment didn't actually address what I said. — Terrapin Station

I literally quoted the bit I was responding to, which was a claim about the beliefs of the ""there is no free will" crowd", specifically that they consider causal determinism with regards to decision-making capacities in the brain to be the standard scientific consensus when it isn't.

I am one of the "there is no free will" crowd and I don't believe in causal determinism with regards to brain activity simply because I haven't looked at anything which has happened in science since the 1800s. I believe in causal determinism with regards to brain activity because it is a widely held view among a large proportion of modern scientists that the elements involved in brain activity are large enough to be treated as classical objects, as specified, word for word, in the quote I cited. Classical objects are those for which

If the present state of an object is known it is possible to predict by the laws of classical mechanics how it will move in the future (determinism) and how it has moved in the past (reversibility).

The threat of jail or punishment is not the same as being thrown in jail or punishment, but it no less indicates a possible future. — NOS4A2

So what. It can't be an actual imposition on liberty because is has no causal effect. It's only a imposition on liberty if I believe the threat, so why don't I just not believe it and then no problem. Seems like it's all the fault of the listener constraining their own liberty by choosing to believe threats.

If only that were what I was referring to (for one).

Also, if only the idea were just about quantum mechanics. — Terrapin Station

Oh dear. Its never not about you and your ideas is it? Read my post and tell me where my response has anything whatsoever to do with what your crazy ideas are or are not about.

also about threats to liberty, ie. coercion. Religion would fall under the latter, even if there is no physical impediment to liberty. — NOS4A2

How is coercion (even if there is no physical impediment) count as a threat to liberty when speech has no causal effect?

But it's an exercise in risk management. By deviating from the truth, you risk being blindsided by it. — Echarmion

Absolutely, but if it's an exercise in risk management, then the measure of the 'power' of any belief is no longer truth is it? Its the valuation resulting from your risk assessment. The most 'powerful' belief is the one with the greatest payoff for the least risk, which may or may not turn out to be true (where 'true' is corresponding with reality). That's the point I was making.

Arguably, Newton's theories were truth at the time, since they were arrived at using proper methodology and not yet falsified. I think there is a distinction between fiction and simulation. You can tell the truth without going into every conceivable detail. — Echarmion

I agree with the first part, I'm a pragmatist, but not the second. Newton's theories (to my limited knowledge) were not just less detailed. They were completely wrong, totally not the way things actually are, a fiction. Just a very useful one.

But the thing about truth is that it limits the utility of fiction. There are things we can afford to be wrong about, but we can never outright ignore truth. — Echarmion

Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

the "there is no free will" crowd always wants to appeal to it being a standard view or implication of the sciences that there is no free will. — Terrapin Station

That's because it completely is the standard view of the sciences, when it comes to brain function.

Although brains obey quantum mechanics, they do not seem to exploit any of its special features. Molecular machines, such as the light-amplifying components of photoreceptors, pre- and post-synaptic receptors and the voltage- and ligand-gated channel proteins that span cellular membranes and underpin neuronal excitability, are so large that they can be treated as classical objects. — Koch C., Hepp K. (2006). Quantum mechanics in the brain. Nature

Base your decision on fiction, and there's always the chance it's going to backfire. So in that sense, truth has power. — Echarmion

Fiction can work better than truth as a decision-making tool if the fiction is more easily calculated and still right most of the time. Newton's theories on gravity are a fiction, they're not a true representation of how gravity works, but for making a quick judgement on thruster adjustment in a returning apollo capsule it's better than Einstein.

So it's not its lack of truth that's making fiction more likely to backfire, it's its lack of utility.

No. I don't think truth is definable, yet we know what it is (or isn't). — frank

I'm not sure how much progress can be made if you can't define it.

Isn't this a case where optimism makes the truth — frank

Yes, probably. I'm a pragmatist when it comes to truth values.

There is something about the truth that makes people want to suppress it, oppose it, forge it, manipulate it, possess it etc. So it does appear to have some intrinsic power. — Serving Zion

I think you're mistaking 'the truth' with a claim to it. Many use those tactics despite knowing full well they're lying.

But shouldn't the truth, by virtue of being the truth, exert some power of its own? We can only reside in fiction for so long, right? — frank

Why would you imagine truth had power? By truth I presume you mean something like correspondence with reality, yes? Consider the possibility that reality is actually extremely complex and full of rare anomalies. Which is the more 'powerful' model, one which is easy to calculate and works 99.99% of the time, or the extremely complex one, which covers all situations but is virtually impossible for a human to understand?

Same goes psychologically. Which is more 'powerful', a true assessment of your liklihood of jumping that gap (to get away from the chasing tiger, obviously), or an optimistic one?

That has little to do with the teeth of the natives. — Banno

Actually, it has everything to do with the teeth of natives. The point of the commons is about the ethics of managing shared resources. The choices are either regulated individual competition (whether those regulations are democratically or dictatorially arrived at is irrelevant), or ethically driven egalitarianism.

Hunter-gatherers lived on one massive common and their social structure was ethically egalitarian. Whether that system 'worked' (or whether we could take some bits of it and apply them to our modern society) is absolutely the crux of the matter.

In the 'it never worked' corner are exactly the kind of colonial myths that @Hanover keeps bringing up. Without competition we'll stagnate. Dispelling them is pretty much foundational to any argument that claims egalitarian ethics can work.

1. They have terrible dental health. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/362.summary — Hanover

Try reading the actual article next time rather than than just googling until you find something that matches your prejudice. The study found decay at a "prevalence of dental disease comparable to that of modern, industrial societies with diets high in refined sugars" in one group and only in the men (the women were much better than modern society). The study was startling entirely because "This is the first time we’ve seen such bad oral health in a pre-agricultural population", the findings were put down to a unique diet high in starchy nuts and considered an oddity.

HIV began in the hunter gatherer community. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26316-perfect-storm-turned-hiv-from-local-to-global-killer/
There is now effective treatment for that. — Hanover

Your comment referred to vaccinating their children. What diseases prevalent in hunter-gatherer societies do vaccinations prevent? Or is that just more prejudicial assumption?

And I'm still waiting for any evidence whatsoever that capitalism was necessary for any of these marvellous medical advances that our society has made.

Can you explain this question? — Terrapin Station

You have frequently rejected arguments against positions you hold which consist of nothing but reference to how many people disagree with you. Your argument above contained no substantive support, simply a claim that everyone above high-school level philosophy would disagree with me (not make the 'mistake' I'm making).

Simply saying that better educated people would not agree with me is not an argument unless there is a body of empirical fact that those people are learnt in, and that is a fact which you yourself have used previously against interlocutors.

So now you state that the reason we have increased life expectancies is because of (1) better neo-natal care, (2) antibiotics, and (3) better surgery, yet for some reason that's irrelevant to the analysis of whether industrialized nations are superior to hunter-gatherer ones. — Hanover

Irrelevant? No. I'm countering the opinion that it has any necessary connection to capitalism. To make that claim you'd have to demonstrate that it was not possible any other way. All three of those factors (though 1 and 3 would be impossible without 2) were discovered by amateur or government sponsored scientists. The uptake of penicillin was actually slowed by a reluctant pharmaceutical market. So how exactly did capitalism play a crucial role in their development?

as if it shouldn't be fairly obvious that if the better part of your day is spent spearing animals and gathering berries and then nomadically journeying to the next more fertile spot wouldn't lend itself very well to developing the next best MRI machine. — Hanover

Sigh! Hunter-gatherers work a shorter working week doing all that than the average westener. The San for example average about 14 hours.

Fortunately what we do, including the US, is to take the money and the skills developed due to our superior economic structure and offer assistance to those less advanced nations and we clean their teeth, purify their water, and vaccinate their citizens, not to mention feed them and provide for them in times of drought. It's called caring for the commons.. — Hanover

1. Hunter-gatherer tribes have better dental health than modern Americans.
2. The water is perfectly safe to drink in the wild, it is contaminated by the consequences of development (agriculture, urbanisation and industrialisation)
3. 9 out of the ten most virulent communicable diseases are caused by agriculture. There are no diseases in hunter-gatherer tribes which are treatable with vaccination programmes.

Your prejudice is clouding your assessment of how much evidence you need to support your position. How much reading on anthropology have you done prior to concluding that native tribes are all backward savages barely scraping a disease-ridden living from the mud?

No. That's not even a sophormoric conflation. It's a freshman-level conflation. Or a high school kid getting high and thinking that he might be interested in philosophy-level conflation. — Terrapin Station

So, ad populum arguments are fair use when they suit you? No need to present a case for why I'm wrong, simply refer to the fact that educated people think I'm wrong, therefore I must be.

So where does that leave your outlandish views on how the mind works, which everyone above high-school level psychology would disagree with?

You can't conflate concepts and what they're concepts of. That's one of the most naive philosophical mistakes. — Terrapin Station

You're presuming that there is a thing that the measurement is a concept of. Absent that presumption there are no two things to conflate. What is my concept off flying space monkeys a concept of?

Now, you can make a sort of "guesstimation measurement" in your head at times, but that's not what we're talking about. — Terrapin Station

So, I look at an object and guess it is six inches. I look at the same object together with a ruler (where I see the number 6) and you're telling me the latter observation is a philosophically distinct thing?

A measurement is a concept. It doesn't exist outside of someone's mind, the only thing I concede probably exists outside of someone's mind is the heterogeneous sea of stuff reality is made of. It doesn't contain measurements, which are a human concept attached to human-determined objects. I don't know how much more clear about this I can be.

Something exists/happens in 'reality'. We decide in our minds what to think about that in terms of naming, significance, prediction, beliefs, associations, modelling etc.

a phenomenon the experience of which (at the irreducible level) does not in principle involve the senses — Robert Lockhart

Firstly, name the 'senses'. Secondly, explain why you think some brain activity ('the senses') make the conclusions therefrom amenable to investigation, yet other brain activity (awareness) does not.

I think it''s also the medications keeping people "alive" well past their "use by' dates. — Janus

Yeah, that too.

The problem with @Hanover's argument is that basically, better surgery and the discovery of antibiotics have had a hugely disproportionate part to play in our increased lifespans and yet this tired old crap gets trotted out every time someone wants to support some generally capitalist policy, that the whole agri-industrial complex has somehow been, in equal part, responsible for these improvements.

I think it has to do with all sorts of things, including medical, all of which are evident in wealthier nations. Capitalism creates wealth and prosperity. — Hanover

According the the WHO "Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today." They're not saying "Antibiotic resistance is basically fine because privatisation, the free-market, property ownership and modern technology all play just as important a role in global health, food security, and development, so no need to worry". Lose antibiotics and modern surgery and we're right back to 19thC death rates, the rest of the economic system has nothing to do with it.

I'm not asking about naming and thinking about. — Terrapin Station

The stuff the measure is made of is objectively there — Isaac

Now are you just going to repeatedly ask the same question, or are you going to address the glaring hypocrisy in dismissing my position because it universalises some theory about the way human minds work, whilst doing exactly the same thing in support of your own position?

That's talking about the concepts. That's not what I'm asking about. — Terrapin Station

I've given my answer to both. The stuff the measure is made of is objectively there, the division by which we name it and think of it as one thing (as opposed to another) is not.

Now, before we get too far into a classic Terrapin diversion I'd like you to answer my question (although I'm going bed now so you have until morning). I asked (in case you missed it with your notification issues)...

... Given what you said above about anomalies, how can you know this [that people can learn to not be offended etc]? Have you asked everyone in the world whether they're capable of doing what you're claiming can be done? Why is it when I claim humans can/can't do X, you say "show me evidence that they can/can't" and require an astonishingly high level of evidence to support it, but when you're supporting your outlandish ideas any old guess as to what human minds are capable of seems to be satisfactory?

So then you don't think that it's subjective. — Terrapin Station

No. I think the measuring device as a distinct object is subjective, the stuff it's made from probably isn't. Where does the stuff stop being 'air' and start being 'plastic'? That's subjective. That there is some stuff to be called 'air' and 'plastic' in the first place, that's not. We decide how we're going to divide reality, but I prefer to think reality itself is outside of our minds.

I wasn't asking you anything like that. I'm asking you if you think it's literally mental content and not a piece of plastic etc. that's independent of your brain — Terrapin Station

No. I think it's independent of my brain, I'm not totally sold on the idea, but it works best for me.

No, I think the device is an artificial division of the stuff reality is made of. I'm pretty agnostic about whether the reality it's made of is actually there.

But this is the first you've asked that. — Hanover

To support your position, you'd have to show how the entire capitalist infrastructure was, in it's entirety, a necessary factor in improving neonatal care and that such improvements could not possibly have been brought about any other way. — Isaac

I think it has to do with all sorts of things, including medical, all of which are evident in wealthier nations. Capitalism creates wealth and prosperity. — Hanover

OK, since your immediate response to me was to ask for a citation, I'll play along in the same spirit. Cite me the evidence that it is more than just medical. Cite me the evidence that capitalism creates wealth and prosperity, and then complete your argument (relative to the thread) that no other system is equally capable of creating wealth and prosperity. All with citations.

there are ways to parse things so that you don't have to be offended, you don't have to see difference as a problem. — Terrapin Station

So, given what you said above about anomalies, how can you know this? Have you asked everyone in the world whether they're capable of doing what you're claiming can be done? Why is it when I claim humans can/can't do X, you say "show me evidence that they can/can't" and require an astonishingly high level of evidence to support it, but when you're supporting your outlandish ideas any old guess as to what human minds are capable of seems to be satisfactory?

Re the quotations, by the way, so then the answer is no, no one has suggested the complex/compound versus simple/atomic categorization you're suggesting? (Because the quotes you pasted sure don't suggest anything like that) — Terrapin Station

I'm not getting into this again where I've got to find some quote with the exact wording your looking for. As far as I'm concerned they're as close as need be. If you don't think so, there's not much I can do about that.

You think that device is just in your mind? Or the readings on the display are just in your mind? — Terrapin Station

Yes. As I said all there can really be (if there's anything at all) is a sea of heterogeneous stuff. The device (as opposed to its immediate surroundings) is an artificial division of that stuff I've made up, the readings are more artificial divisions of that stuff I made up.

Making this stuff up the way we do, and broadly agreeing with each other about what divisions we're going to put where really works well as a way to get on with life. Making up theories with laws about how things work really helps too.

But just as the observation and the readings from your laser measure are my subjective interpretation of the heterogeneous sea of stuff, so is my feeling about my brain activity. If we happily rely on one, call it 'truth', on the basis of consistency, repeatability etc. then we can do so with the other. They're not different categories of thing. In both cases, something is happening to the heterogeneous sea of stuff (the laser measure in one case, my brain in another) and my mind is interpreting it. I check those interpretations with others, test them, keep the ones which work for me, discard the ones which don't. Part of what science does (psychology included) is checking with others, checking repeatability, and yes sometimes we discard anomalies because it works better that way, so what?

First off, there's been absolutely nothing to even suggest that anyone is forwarding a categorization of complex/compound versus simple/atomic moral stances. Has any of the research you're appealing to forwarded that? — Terrapin Station

socialization influences moral development and explains why moral rules change with space and historical time, human infants enter the world equipped with cognitions and motivations that incline them to be moral and prosocial (Hamlin, 2015)

Such early emerging predispositions toward prosocial behavior, and sociomoral evaluation reflect prewired capacities that were adaptive to our forebears.

However, this does not imply that morality is itself an adaptation favored by natural selection. Instead, the moral sense observed in humans may be a consequence of several cognitive, executive, and motivational capacities which are the attributes that natural selection directly promoted (Ayala, 2010)

The world outside of minds, obviously. — Terrapin Station

What, the measurement? I've never seen one. All that's in the world outside of mind is (if anything at all) a sea of heterogeneous stuff. All objects, measurements, laws, and concepts are constructions of the human mind.

You have to consider the possibility that other things have gone wrong, including the theory. — Terrapin Station

Yes, hence my reluctance to go back over the several thousand experimental results firming the history of psychological research in order to demonstrate that this has already been considered. Psychologists are not idiots (despite the protestations of phil science grads). They have already looked at aberrant results, already considered how they could devise further experiments to confirm/deny theories about those aberrations, already carried out and drawn reasonable conclusions from these further tests. This is just normal science, partly because of interventions like Duhem-Quine. What you're presenting here as a devastating "ah-ha" moment is something we learned in A-level psychology. It's something very much in the mind of most serious researchers.

The measurement isn't in your mind. — Terrapin Station

Where is it then?

I'm still waiting for you to intrinsically link the whole of the capitalist infrastructure to preventing childhood deaths. It's got nothing to do with how awful it is that such societies still experience this tragedy, it's to do with your incredibly political claim that the elimination of such tragic circumstances is somehow inextricably linked to privatisation and capitalism.

It's a small number of very specific factors which cause this problem (mostly medical), not an entire socio-economic structure.

That might be, but we don't go by subjective reports for this. We make objective measurements. — Terrapin Station

We can't make objective measurements. Every measurement is of the form "I looked at the measuring instrument and it seemed to me to say X". It is a subjective account. We believe it on the basis of commonality and utility. It's not a different kind of account. Absolutely everything we know is a subjective account of the way things seem to us to be.

Recalcitrant data for the Earth being round is a different objective measurement. Not someone's subjective report. — Terrapin Station

How is "I measured the earth and found it to be flat" not a subjective report?

So, as to my post where I proclaimed life industrialized nations would result in a profoundly longer life span, how does anything here disprove that? — Hanover

The figure you used was 40s which is incorrect and you then went on to say...

The point being that privatization and democratic rule have led to great prosperity — Hanover

... which the figures do not show since every other aspect of hunter-gather lifestyle (aside from neonatal care) seems entirely consistent with a reasonably long and healthy life.

Thanks. That saved me a job.

That would be a classic example of disregarding recalcitrant data in the guise of theory-worshipping. — Terrapin Station

OK, so how do we go about holding any theory at all by that standard? We have a theory that the earth is round but Bill says he measured it and it came out flat. Do we have to re-think our theory, or just dismiss Bill's results as probably an error?

You're basically begging the question of your 'no unconscious mental events' theory. We can never disprove it because any brain activity we link to unconscious thought, doesn't count without the correct first-person account. If you want to hold self-immunised theories, that's fine, but there's no point in discussing them.

As I've said before. Quite a lot of careful work over tens of thousands of man-hours has gone into considering issues like this. I can't give a degree course in psychology over the Internet to convince you these matters have been considered already. If you have a specific experiment you want to question the methodology of, I don't mind going through that, but spending time convincing you that the whole of psychology is not a castle in the air is not something I'm interested in doing I'm afraid.

I often do not receive notifications for posts you respond to. — Terrapin Station

Happens to me too, I'll try and '@' you if ever I think you're missing out on my edifying pronouncements.

It's not clear just from that text that they're claiming something akin to "Moral stances of type x (that is, of a certain complexity and/or specificity) must be based on moral stances of type y (of less complexity/specificity), even if moral stances of type y are unconscious," which is what you were claiming. — Terrapin Station

So, the main thing you'd need to explain to counter this theory, is what the prefrontal cortex is doing when making complex moral choices, if they are just intuited. That's the main sticking point with your theory. Both functional imaging and brain damage studies show this activity. They also show different areas of the brain functioning with simple desire satisfaction, stimuli avoidance, even phobic responses. Basically, everything we associate with 'intuition' happens in areas of the brain outside of the key area engaged in complex moral decision making, which just happens to be an area also involved in prediction, calculation and weighing choices. Are you suggesting we put that down to coincidence?

You could conclude from this that no moral decisions are intuitive (though other studies would counter that), but what does not match that evidence is your theory that all moral decisions are intuitive feelings.

Part of examining just how they're defining terms would be looking at whether they'd "define away" someone intuiting moral stance M, where it's not consciously based on any other moral stance, despite being of type x (a certain complexity and/or specificity), as "not being morality" because it's not meeting some requirement or other — Terrapin Station

You'd have to look into the experiments themselves for that. I know a very large proportion of the older ones were done using the trolley problem, then that was updated (it was considered a bit 'sterile') to a variety of 'aid' dilemmas (what you would risk to help a person) and unfair judgement responses (deliberately treating third parties unfairly).

Those cultures, of what of them that are left, even in their still unspoiled environments, who hunt and gather ethically, making certain to leave to nature what is owed nature, live and die with the amount of rainfall in every season, and some even survive into their 40s. — Hanover

This is just such a tired old trope. Among most hunter-gatherer groups those making it past the age of 5 live to an average 65 years, the same life expectancy of modern Glasgow. What drags the average life expectancy down is a high infant mortality rate (lots of people dying at 4 is going to make the average age at death much lower).

So if you want to elbow in the whole of the capitalist infrastructure as a cause of greater life expectancy to better fit your world view, then be my guest. But to anyone looking objectively at it, one thing and one thing alone is responsible for the change in life expectancy and that's better neonatal medical care.

To support your position, you'd have to show how the entire capitalist infrastructure was, in it's entirety, a necessary factor in improving neonatal care and that such improvements could not possibly have been brought about any other way.

Found it.

To directly support my comment.

Work across various academic disciplines has converged on the view that morality arises from the integration of both innate abilities which are shaped by natural selection and deliberative processes that interact with social environments and cultural exposure

And are you open to a critical examination of the paper and its claims? — Terrapin Station

The paper is basically a summary of the state of psychological and neuroscienetific thinking on the matter. If you're not going to trust the expert judgement (which I've already outlined), then there's nothing much in that paper to go on. This is the problem with your attitude that any expert position can be critically examined. There have been literally thousands of experiments done in this field. You cannot possibly examine them all, nor would you have the background knowledge to do so. Experts in the field examine some of them, other experts collate the conclusions of those experts, other experts summarise all that in conclusions like the one I quoted. Could they all be wrong? Absolutely. Have we got a chance in hell of reasonably demonstrating that they are? No.

If you want to critically examine the experiments which have lead to the conclusions I cited, be my guest. There are 95 citations in that paper alone, and many of those are citing other summaries which themselves have scores of experimental results cited. I'll find a link to the paper, when you've read through the several thousand experiments it collectively cites, I'd love to hear your thoughts on their conclusions.

Can you give an example of the psychological evidence you're referring to? At least that would take the conversation somewhere different. — Terrapin Station

The paper I cited is a really good overview. I've not got a good Internet connection at the moment, but I'll see if I can track down a link with no paywall.